Need
by elphabathedelirious32
Summary: Musicalverse, oneshot. After I'm Not that Girl but before Elphaba leaves for the city. Elphaba and Fiyero have a conversation. Fiyeraba.


From where he stood, in the twilight, you could almost believe she was an ordinary girl, a university student. When you couldn't see her color or her face, you could believe she was concerned with the ordinary facts of collegiate life, with classes and friends and parties and whom she liked, like _that_, which even now the students still used, not quite used to their new quasi-adulthood, though they had certainly longed for it.

But she wasn't. She sat on the stone bench in the garden, a memorial to some dead man or other, and stared at nothing, which would have made other students wary even if she wasn't green, even if they didn't know her as Elphaba Thropp, who, as if being green weren't affront to society enough, had weird powers and who yelled about obscure, boring, political things all the time.

"I know you're there," she told him quietly. She wasn't in the mood for sarcasm. Fiyero stepped out of the shadows and came toward her.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"I don't know why you'd think I would tell you." She looked at him, finally, her eyes veiled. "I don't even know you." The shared memory of their afternoon with the Lion cub, bloody poppy sunset behind them, the taste of rebellion metallic in their mouths, rose in the air between them.

"You do know me, though. Better than most."

"I've only spoken to you once."

"Yes…but still." He cursed himself immediately. How was it that he had suddenly become inarticulate, he, Fiyero of the silver tongue, the brilliant pick-up lines and the litany of ready excuses?

"But still," she echoed thoughtfully. "It doesn't really mean anything."

"But you understand it, so it does, doesn't it?"

"So you can play at amateur philosophy!" she clapped her hands mockingly in a way that reminded him, disturbingly, of Galinda.

"What's wrong?" he repeated, wearying of her games. Falseness was an attitude that she did not wear well, she whose defining characteristic was her inexorable ability to be herself without limitations.

She pulled an emerald green envelope from her satchel and flicked it back and forth like a fan. "To see the Wizard," she said by way of explanation. "Galinda's probably told you."

He was taken aback. "But isn't that a good thing?" he asked, bewildered.

"Yes, ostensibly," she replied. "No, it is. It's just…" she sighed deeply.

"You can tell me. I won't say anything."

She looked at him again, and he could tell she was remembering the secrets of his own inner self that had passed between them as they stared strangely at each other over the top of a cage in the most impossibly unrealistic situation either had ever found themselves in. Which, considering the pair, was really quite difficult to achieve.

"I've always wanted to _do _something," she said finally. "To help. To help right wrongs…all that sort of thing. Which sounds completely ridiculous outside of my own twisted head, but there it is."

"It doesn't sound ridiculous."

"Yes, it does. Don't lie. And it seems that this," she waved the Wizard's envelope carelessly at him, "Would be the best way. It just seems too good to be true. Too surreal."

He looked at her carefully.

"There's something else."

"You're right," she sighed. "Inertia of the spirit, I suppose. I don't want to go and not come back."

"Now why would you do that?"

She shrugged. "I won't come back the same as I am now, at any rate. No one ever does, from anywhere, even the market. You have had new experiences, time has passed…you're different, even in the most infinitesimal way possible."

"You don't ever step in the same river twice."

"Exactly." She stood suddenly and it was like a dam had burst inside of her, letting her thoughts tangle into a waterfall of loosely threaded words. "But what if this just ends up with him giving me some job, some high-profile-do-nothing job or some insignificant-locked-in-a-closet job? Or nothing. And then I won't have helped, maybe won't ever help. I don't want to help from a distance, even if it's more effective. Oh! I need to _do _something. Right now. I need to _effect _something." She grasped his hands suddenly, desperately, and despite himself he felt a thrill of exhilaration run through him. She was the strangest person he had ever met, and he wanted to know with the same desperate intensity that she had what went on within her head.

"Oh, _please_, Fiyero," she said, "Help me _do _something, before I burst into a thousand pieces with nothing to hold me together anymore."

He did the only thing that seemed reasonable, the only thing he could.

He kissed her, so she wouldn't fall apart. He kissed her so, for a moment, she wouldn't fly away.


End file.
